Oil Extraction in the Middle East: The Kuwait Experience
Oil has been the lubricant of international relations and industry since the turn of the twentieth century. The fabulous wealth it has generated for a clutch of individuals, states, and corporations has skewed global politics, fed human greed, fuelled conflict, and brought as much destruction as delight in its wake. The struggle for access to and control over oil was central to the final stages of imperial expansion, and the Middle East saw a regional equivalent of the ‘scramble for Africa’. European powers sought to carve up the area as the twentieth century turned, their eyes fixed on oil as the main prize. Central to our argument is that empire followed natural resources, in unpredictable ways. It created commodity frontiers that had enormous implications for routes of expansion and relations with local societies. The future of the Middle East, then under the sway of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, was already of great concern to Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century. But oil provided a new urgency, and shaped patterns of intervention; the history of the Middle East over the next century would have been profoundly different without it. Although capital became more mobile from the late nineteenth century, some of the most valuable natural resources in the twentieth-century Empire proved to be rooted to specific regions. In this sense, oil as a natural resource shaped the geography of empire, as had fur and forests before it. But the specific character of oil and of imperialism in the region (our focus is on Kuwait), resulted in rather different outcomes for local societies than those experienced on some other earlier commodity frontiers. Although the oil companies were largely foreign-owned, Middle Eastern people were, to a much greater degree, beneficiaries of resource extraction. In this respect, there are parallels with Malaysia. An important concern in this chapter is to chart the impact of oil on Bedouin pastoralists in Kuwait, their use of the desert, and its environmental implications. We also explore briefly other environmental impacts of oil exploitation. These are issues less frequently rehearsed than the political and economic consequences. The energy needs of the metropolitan world led to increasing demands for oil as the twentieth century advanced.